The row between the major opposition party in Swaziland
and the most vocal of the prodemocracy movement’s organisations is largely
irrelevant to the campaign for democracy in the kingdom.
PUDEMO (the People’s United Democratic Movement) suspended
the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) yesterday (9 May 2012) and is throwing
it out of its offices. This follows long-running arguments about the direction
of the struggle for democracy in Swaziland.
The SSN runs a Google forum in which many people in the
past few months posted criticisms of PUDEMO’s leadership. This so angered
PUDEMO that it indefinitely suspended SSN, an organisation it founded in 1997.
SSN is refusing to accept this ruling and an almighty fight can be expected.
Look out for blood on the carpets at the SSN office in Johannesburg.
The main criticisms of SSN from PUDEMO are the manner in
which it has used its Google Forum (and there is also an associated Facebook
site) to undermine the struggle for democracy.
But both PUDEMO and SSN fail to realise is that no one
apart from themselves reads these sites.
The SSN Google group has 800 members and its Facebook
page has 2,800, and it’s a fair bet that many people in the Google Group are
also in the Facebook group, so the total number of people SSN has online is
probably no more than 2,100. But hardly any of them are in Swaziland, where only
about 90,000 people are on the Internet and of these 63,720 are on Facebook – and
there is no reason to suspect that most of these Facebookers ever read the SSN
page.
Who knows how many of these ‘members’ actually read what
is posted on the sites, but it is clear that only a tiny number of people (perhaps
no more than a dozen) actually regularly post on the sites. The most prolific
of these posters are not in Swaziland, but in South Africa and Canada.
So, hardly anyone in Swaziland reads the SSN and in
reality the campaigners are talking to one another.
Many of the posts are nothing to do with Swaziland, but
consist of academic tracts about revolution and Communists. Last year when Col Muammar
Gaddafi was kicked out of Libya, many of the SSN posters argued vehemently in
favour of Gaddafi and against the ‘counter revolutionaries’ trying to overthrow
him.
Any serious observer of the scene in Swaziland, where
King Mswati III rules as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, and all political
parties are banned, knows the Internet means nothing to most Swazi people.
About 70 percent of Swazis live in rural areas and rely
on local chiefs (who are the King’s representative) for their livelihoods. They have little understanding of the concept
of democratic reform. Through the chiefs and control of the media, the monarchy
has managed successfully to keep people depoliticised and largely unorganised. Intimidation
from the state police and ‘defence forces’ is also used to keep the mass of the
Swazi population passive.
The real struggle for democracy needs to take place in
the rural areas, not online. The SSN Internet sites do nothing to change the situation
of ordinary Swazi people and the row between PUDEMO and SSN about what is
published online is irrelevant.
It is like two bald men fighting over a comb.
See also
SWAZI DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT SPLITS
Spot on Richard.
ReplyDeleteSpot on Richard
ReplyDelete